Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  “For one thing, I think you’re assuming that, had it been you, you would have traded your life to save Brenna and the kids. But—what if that wasn’t an option? What if she offered herself and Maric didn’t want to negotiate with that?”

  Daniel scrubbed his hair, listening.

  “For another, picture a deranged man holding a gun at Brenna’s head. Could you say: ‘Go ahead. Shoot her. I pick the kids’? No. Especially not with a man who couldn’t be trusted to keep his word. I think if she was in immediate danger, you’d do everything you could to keep him from pulling that trigger.”

  His dad’s assessment jolted him. Even after all he had experienced in Kavsak, he was still naïvely thinking that individuals had power—that every bad choice had a good counterpart.

  “Reading between the lines of what you’ve told me—and forgive me, I’m not trying to pry, but I get the impression she’d been making love to you before all this happened?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “Well, that’s another piece of what a woman is, isn’t it?

  “What?”

  “A mate, son. Someone who stands by your side, come what may.”

  Linens, china, crystal, silver.

  U.S. Special Envoy Brendan Rease was eating alone in his room. Room service had poured his glass of Errazuriz Max Reserva’s Cabernet Sauvignon for him, plated his Chateaubriand with Onion Potatoes, Vegetables, Pepper Sauce and Sauce Béarnaise, and then left him alone, at his request. He was looking forward to a rare quiet evening.

  There was a tap at his suite door from Martindale’s adjoining office.

  “Oh, for God’s sakes.”

  Martindale, always in a dark suit irrespective of the hour, entered his quarters. “You have a visitor, Ambassador.”

  Who in blazes was disturbing him this late?

  “Doctor Jelena Subasic, sir. Brenna’s fixer’s mother. Her plane set down an hour ago. She was escorted directly here per your instructions.”

  He hesitated, debating whether to grant a morning appointment, or to see her immediately.

  “It’s been a long trip for her, sir. The extraction from Kavsak was harrowing. She looks…well, exhausted.”

  “Get me her folder.” He’d reviewed it again and had spotted something.

  Martindale went to his desk and returned with it.

  He took the dossier, flipped through the pages, and found the hand-written application that Brenna had presumably filled in and signed. He stabbed at a line with his finger. Aha. He snapped it shut and handed it back. “See this woman in.”

  “Yes, Ambassador.”

  A minute later, a diminutive, very thin, silver-haired woman treaded softly into his suite from Martindale’s anterior office. The quintessential image of a refugee, she was wearing a dress that had once been of good quality but was now threadbare, her shoes were worn at the heels, and she was holding a bundle in her arms.

  He tipped his head, inspecting her more closely.

  She was standing spine-straight, meeting his gaze, evaluating him as frankly as he was her. She was a professor, Balkan history. Perhaps she appraised her students in like manner, skeptical of their stories of lost essays but open to honest persuasion.

  Her lips puckered briefly. She swept her eyes over his luxurious suite, at the antiques, the oil paintings, the view beyond the windows. Only once did her brown eyes falter, when they landed on his uneaten meal.

  Discomfited suddenly by his opulent surroundings, he stepped forward. “So,” he said. “This is the child.”

  “Your granddaughter,” she said softly, holding up her elbow to show him the baby’s face.

  He glimpsed two eyelash crescents and a pelt of brown hair as dull as that of a dog that slept under a porch.

  “Brenna’s adopted daughter, Elizabeth Ann, named after Brenna’s mother. But Brenna calls her ‘Squeak’.”

  Gotcha.

  Jelena Subasic’s eyes flickered.

  Fear, he thought. Guilt. But he wouldn’t underestimate the old gal. She was a survivor.

  “Have a seat,” he said, holding a hand out in the direction of the chaise longue.

  She stepped forward, as hesitant as if he had asked her to cross a known mine field, and sat on the edge of the chaise, settling the weight of the baby on her lap.

  He did not sit down. He closed in on her so that he towered over her and forced her to look up to talk to him. “My daughter made no mention of a child to me.”

  She blinked.

  “Odd, don’t you think? A new mother, not chattering on about the baby she had just adopted?”

  “Brenna married, no, without your knowledge?” She tipped her head, lifted an inquiring eyebrow. “She is not in the habit of sharing her life with you?”

  Touché. He winced inwardly.

  She stood up, crowding him aside. “Excuse me.” She moved to the window and stared out, rubbing the baby’s back.

  “It is not uncommon for children to be moved across borders on forged paperwork,” he said. “It is the mandate of the U. S. State Department to verify—”

  “Throughout its history,” she interrupted, turning to face him, “when expedient, the United States government has assisted known war criminals across its borders—persons who offered political favors on foreign soil in support of covert American interests. Do you fear this infant threatens your national security?”

  He went to his desk, pulled out the dossier, and plucked out the handwritten adoption application, allegedly signed by Brenna. Walking over to her, he held it up. “It troubles me that my daughter—who supposedly personally filled out this form—misspelled her mother’s name. ‘Ann’, without the ‘e’ at the end.”

  Dr. Subasic turned her shoulder, as if sheltering the baby from him.

  “It seems improbable,” he persisted, “that Brenna would name the baby with her own two middle names, and not know the correct family spelling, don’t you think?”

  Her mouth tightened. She studied the dark street below, ignoring the paper he was flapping. “You have been up here alone too long,” she said.

  “Up—?”

  “Above the streets, looking down. Wielding power.” She said it as if it were a sad thing.

  “Now hear—”

  “Brenna told me you have a large family, yes?”

  He didn’t care to be questioned, but he had to keep her talking if he were going to catch her subterfuge. “Six boys. One girl.”

  “All alive?”

  “Of course.”

  Jelena Subasic’s eyes clouded with pain. “Of course,” she echoed softly. “And these sons, they have all married? They have children? You are a grandfather?”

  “Fifteen grandchildren. Another on the way.”

  “So many,” she mused. “Enough that Brenna’s daughter—this daughter of your daughter that she loved enough to run back to rescue—can be sacrificed on the basis of the letter ‘e’.”

  Her rebuke rendered him speechless.

  “Family is not merely flesh and blood,” she continued. “Most centrally, it is about a committed heart. Brenna is Squeak’s mother as certainly as if she had carried her in her own body. I will deliver this child into her arms and only her arms.”

  He felt his ire rising. He looked her up and down. How dare this ragged woman challenge him?

  She chuckled dryly. “There are two classes of untouchable people, Ambassador. Those with great wealth and influence. And those who have already lost everything they had to lose.” She straightened her shoulders. “I advise you not to test me on this issue.”

  She padded toward Martindale’s office door.

  He spun around and called after her. “You are mistaken, Doctor Subasic,” he said, nodding at the baby. “You have not yet lost everything.”

  “No. But neither are you untouchable, Ambassador. For if you deny your daughter this child, you will die an unforgiven man.”

  He pulled his head back instinctively, as if she had taken a swipe at him. H
e scowled. He didn’t care to be challenged. But his indignation quickly melted. He was enjoying this, he realized. It had been a long time since he’d encountered a woman who had both spine and good spirit.

  She lifted her head, locked eyes with him, as steady as a sniper with his mark in the crosshairs. “The child’s papers are impeccable. If you are suggesting otherwise—that Elizabeth Ann and I cannot travel freely to America—I will stay here where you have no authority to detain me, and I will call Brenna to me. She will come, as any mother would.”

  He frowned. Brenna? To Europe? To the very city where General Cavic was spirited in and out without alerting international police forces? If this child was who Dr. Subasic said she was, she constituted the perfect bait for Cavic’s trap.

  “No,” he said at length. The child’s papers contained anomalies, but he was convinced, now, that she was being brought to Brenna. “There’s no need for Brenna to come here.”

  Jelena Subasic’s shoulders relaxed. A small cry emerged from the baby blanket. It sounded like the mew of a day-old kitten. Squeak.

  “Good,” she said, her age-softened hands immediately rising to calm the baby. “So you won’t mind preparing us a letter of safe passage under the seal of your office, with your signature affixed that everything is in order.”

  Every ‘i’ dotted, every ‘t’ crossed, she didn’t say. Every ‘e’ accounted for and endorsed by the Special Envoy himself. He chuckled. Had to. The old gal had outfoxed him. He should hire her, sit her at the negotiating table—on his side.

  His guest swayed unsteadily, her face so pale he thought she was about to faint. “When did you last eat?” he asked, surprised by his uncharacteristic impulse not to let her go. “I can have the kitchen send you up some dinner while Martindale prepares the letter.”

  Her eyes slid longingly to his uneaten dinner.

  “I have been hungry for a long time,” she admitted with quiet dignity. “But the baby needs it more.”

  He looked away, chagrined. Accustomed to scarcity, she did not assume there was enough food for both of them. Old, exhausted, destitute, torn from the disaster that was Kavsak and dropped surreally into the lap of luxury, she had lost her husband and four sons, but thought first of the baby. How—through what essential goodness—had she kept such a generous heart?

  “If the kitchen has no formula, I’ll see they get some.”

  “In the meantime, please. Some bread soaked in milk? Do they have bananas, maybe? Squeak can eat soft foods. Pureed fruit?”

  He stepped forward, ashamed he’d just considered having his now-cold dinner tossed out and replaced. He lifted his arms. “May I?” Take the baby before you both drop.

  She tightened her grip on the bundle.

  “I give you my word. No harm will come to her.”

  “Revise your promise, Ambassador: ‘I give you my word. This child is Brenna’s child and I will do nothing that will impede her safe delivery into her mother’s arms’.”

  “My dear lady. I’m not about to snatch her from you. What a spectacle we would make—an eighty-year-old Envoy with a baby being chased down the corridor of a five-star hotel by an irate refugee. No, no. Wouldn’t do. Come now. Your arms are trembling with fatigue from bearing her weight.”

  “This child is Brenna’s child,” she intoned.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he relented. “I give you my word. This child is Brenna’s child—” as he repeated her words, they became true and he finished earnestly. He would deliver the baby to his daughter. Provided he ever found her.

  She passed the baby to him, a warm, feather-light bundle who had just officially become his newest grand-daughter. “Please,” he said. “Have a seat. Join me for dinner.”

  He accompanied her to the chaise longue in case she needed his arm, then went to Martindale’s doorway, staying reassuringly in her line of sight. Ignoring the shocked look when his aide saw him holding the baby, the Envoy asked him to order food, to book a room for Dr. Jelena Subasic, and to prepare a letter of safe passage for her.

  Returning to the seating area, he settled beside her, inadvertently jostling Elizabeth Ann (without the ‘e’). Gazing down at her, he saw her dark eyes pop open. Her eyelashes, he thought, formed a lovely arc. And her hair, with regular feeding, would gloss up.

  “Well, hello,” he said, aware of the woman leaning against his shoulder, admiring the child with him.

  Elizabeth Ann squirmed, mewling against the restraint of her wrap. He loosened it. A tiny hand shot out and gripped his nose.

  “Oh!” Jelena exclaimed, quickly closing her fingers around the tiny wrist and drawing it gently back. “I should have warned you. Noses fascinate her.”

  He laughed. “With seven children of my own, believe me, I’ve had my nose seized before.” He glanced sideways at her, thinking how long it had been since a woman had sat so close to him, since he had felt the comforting graze of a warm arm along his own. Having lost Anne as his guiding light, he wondered, had he really become the arrogant, high-handed, short-tempered sonofabitch everyone said he was?

  Anne would have disapproved of his behavior with Jelena, had she been here to see how he had failed to offer the most rudimentary handshake, or how he’d tried to intimidate her by towering over her. Good God! He’d kept her standing there, half-starved, holding a baby who grew heavier by the moment while he tried to entrap her over the spelling of a name.

  It was little wonder women chose not to be near him. Jelena was right. He had been ‘up here’ for too long. If not for her, he would have wrested a needy child out of his own daughter’s care.

  He groaned, disgusted with himself, feeling a shift, as if he were standing on a sheet of ice that had gradually melted from layers deep beneath it and simply started sliding with him on it.

  This dignified woman had met his bristly, self-defended daughter half a world away from him and somehow managed to establish a connection so deep, so devoted, that she would cross war zones, continents, and oceans, just to place this scruffy bit of humanity in her arms—a scruffy bit, moreover, whose undoubtedly-forged papers could land Jelena Subasic in prison for human trafficking.

  How did you make that link to Brenna? he wanted to ask. How did you get her to trust you, and share her life with you? Because I have been an abject failure at it.

  “Dr. Subasic,” he said. “I apologize for my behavior. The baby was…unexpected.”

  She glanced up, studying him with her astute eyes.

  “Brenna never told me there was a child she loved,” he admitted sadly. Never told him she had fallen in love with an Israeli Colonel and married him. Never sought his comfort when her relationship with Daniel Ellsworth fell apart.

  She wouldn’t even tell him where she was.

  Brenna lay on her back on the grass at the edge of the cliff, her hands tucked under her head, gazing at the sky. A soft breeze, carrying the scent of sea and salt, was flowing across her body, lifting wisps of her hair, fluttering her blouse. The dome above her was blue, and though she knew physics could explain the wonder, she preferred to think of it as magical that clouds and moon and stars floated in the sky.

  She liked it here, the sun warming her, adding tone to her pale skin. She felt she could stay forever, nestled in this cozy cottage near the shore.

  The call and reply of birds, the whisper of pine needles in the wind, the tenacity of the thinnest blade of grass held her in thrall. This was the world humans were intended to inhabit, with its soft curves and ageless endurance. Human eyes were designed to behold flowing patterns, not the hard edges of steel and concrete. Human ears were tuned to the lap of water on the shore, not the roars and screeches of heavy machines.

  It felt right to interpose some distance, to sequester herself from the simmering undercurrent of aggression that existed in Washington, D.C., the constant jostle and positioning required to hold one’s place in any congested city.

  She knew there was competition in the natural world. But there was an order,
too, that human congregations did not mimic. Bird ate insect, insect ate leaf, leaf fed soil. There was balance. Predators and prey were interdependent. Neither side could take too much. Greed didn’t bring victory, it yielded collapse. In nature, life and death were not wanton, not vengeful, not wasteful.

  Not personal, like Maric.

  She brought her knees up, crossed right over left. The pant leg of the shorts she had ordered on the internet slid down her thigh, exposing the scar. Ugly knot of gnarled flesh, constant reminder of her last night in Kavsak. She rubbed her thumb over its irregular surface.

  Her spirit remained as knotted as the flesh on her thigh.

  Margaret knew the outline of what Brenna had done in Kavsak—she’d heard through Daniel. But Brenna hadn’t spoken of it herself. Too big. Too devastating. So many times she had stood at the threshold of that story and not been able to cross it. Even with Margaret by her side, she didn’t have the courage to drag Maric out of the darkness to examine what he had wrought.

  She had noticed Margaret working, observed her technique of drawing out details of her life stories to give them form and chronology, of identifying underlying assumptions and reshaping her perspectives on them. Margaret was adept, kindly. But Brenna couldn’t see how anyone could reframe what had occurred in that nursery into something she could live with.

  She closed her eyes, nauseous, sense memory like a meniscus on the banks of recollection. She took deep breaths. Go away. Be erased.

  To be safe, she had to make certain no child was ever again placed in her care, ensure she never again loved a man as much as she loved Daniel.

  The motion sensor in Daniel’s back yard switched on the light as he trod wearily around the side of the house to the back deck. Another late night. More fruitless effort to finish the script. Every attempt he made to maneuver words into a cogent story that explained the fates of the children without divulging Brenna’s role in it, ended in failure. Only the truth explained all the facts.

  Luc had e-mailed back. He said no orphans had been brought through the airport for transfer to refugee agencies. He also asked about Brenna, unaware that she had left Daniel. It had been difficult to write back and say they were no longer together, that he didn’t even know where she was.